BNP At Home Recommends: Black Lightning: Cold Dead Hands

With everything that’s going on in the world right now, a lot of us are either spending all of our time at home or at least a lot less of it doing what we used to. The result of this newfound lifestyle is a lot more free time than we were prepared to have.

While you might think that this is the perfect time for comic book publishers to take advantage of readers as a captive audience, that hasn’t been the case. Instead of getting new releases of comics every week, most of the industry was placed on a temporary freeze.

We at Black Nerd Problems are here to help fill the void by giving you recommendations of some of our favorite comics that you can go back and check out for yourself.

If you’re not quite ready for a longer commitment, a mini-series may be right up your alley. Black Lightning: Cold Dead Hands was a succinct six issues and brought Black Lightning’s original creator Tony Isabella back to the character—and DC Comics— for the first time in over a decade.

Airing around the debut of the CW’s Black Lightning series, Cold Dead Hands served as a good primer for the character’s backstory and philosophy while giving him a more updated look outside of the disco-inspired outfit he adorned in the 1970s.

The series reintroduces an older, seasoned Jefferson Pierce taking on his arch-nemesis, Tobias Whale, as he investigates how a new brand of high-tech weapons have started to flood the streets of his hometown of Cleveland.

If you’re interested in comics pulling from real-life events, this series leans heavily on a lot of the same discussions we’re still having today in the real world about how to fight violence and community relations with local police. As someone with an interest in politics, this was right up my alley.